Hello everyone and Happy New Year! For those of you who celebrate it, I hope you had a great Christmas. And a warm welcome to the new subscribers, for whom this is their first newsletter.

Well, during the first three months of the year in Tenerife, there are some big things going on. Let's consider the first one. In Spain in general, nobody will have received their Christmas presents yet. This is because they have to wait for Epifanía, or Epiphany, on January 6th. The presents are delivered, not by Santa Claus, but the Three Kings of the Nativity story. The evening before (January 5th) is La Cabalgata de Los Reyes, or Cavalcade of the Kings. This is a big affair, with processions and such like. If you're fortunate enough to be in Santa Cruz at this time, you'll see the Three Kings arrive by helicopter! They land in the football ground, then climb on camels and lead off
the procession. Well worth seeing.

Next, we are rapidly approaching Carnival season. The biggest and best on the island, of course, is the one in Santa Cruz - the second biggest in the world, after Rio. This year, the theme is "The 1980s" and it takes place from the 3rd to the 14th of February. If you go to it, make sure you're in fancy dress, or you'll be the odd one out.

The next biggest is Puerto de La Cruz and this takes place between January the 31st and February the 13th. Other notable ones take place in Los Cristianos (Feb 26th to Mar 7th - and, uniquely, also features a fairground), Los Gigantes and Tacaronte.

Towards the end of last year, Alison and I made one of our periodic visits to the island and I, dutifully, made notes of the prices of food and drink as much as it was possible, to keep my Food and Drink Prices up to date. I don't think there was much change, but I'll be going through it to amend any prices that are now out of date.

Now we come to something that is really puzzling me. During the last few months, I have been occasionally contacted by people, either via Feedback or the Q&A page, saying that they have had unauthorised withdrawals from their bank accounts or charges put on their credit card and, for some reason, they think the Tenerife Information Centre is responsible. A company called "Zapping.tv Tenerife" has been mentioned more than once. I have yet to get to the bottom of how my website is implicated. I am really concerned about this, because, apart from anything else, it is damaging my site's reputation. The Tenerife Information Centre does not sell anything, so has no need for anybody's bank details. In any case, I don't have the ability to access them, nor would I want to. So, please, if this happens to any of you (so far, they all seem to reside in the US), inform your bank immediately and contact me, by Feedback, giving me full details of what your bank statement says about
the unauthorised transaction to see in what way my site is implicated.

Anyway, sorry to end the newsletter on a bit of a downer, but it needs sorting. Sorry, too, that it's been quite a brief one this time - in a bit of a rush. It was only written yesterday! Nothing like leaving things till the last minute!

That's it for now. Hope you all have a great 2016 and I'll speak to you again in three month's time.